Category: Society Page 32 of 69

The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson has a must-read piece on the United Auto Workers union, and why hating unions holds a hallowed place in Republican ideology:

[B]y the early 1950s, the UAW had secured a number of contractual innovations — annual cost-of-living adjustments, for instance — that set a pattern for the rest of American industry and created the broadly shared prosperity enjoyed by the nation in the 30 years after World War II.

The architects did not stop there. During the Reuther years, the UAW also used its resources to incubate every up-and-coming liberal movement in America. It was the UAW that funded the great 1963 March on Washington and provided the first serious financial backing for César Chávez’s fledgling farm workers union. The union took a lively interest in the birth of a student movement in the early ’60s, providing its conference center in Port Huron, Mich., to a group called Students for a Democratic Society when the group wanted to draft and debate its manifesto. Later that decade, the union provided resources to help the National Organization for Women get off the ground and helped fund the first Earth Day. And for decades after Reuther’s death in a 1970 plane crash, the UAW was among the foremost advocates of national health care — a policy that, had it been enacted, would have saved the Big Three tens of billions of dollars in health insurance expenses, but which the Big Three themselves were until recently too ideologically hidebound to support.

Narrow? Parochial? The UAW not only built the American middle class but helped engender every movement at the center of American liberalism today — which is one reason that conservatives have always held the union in particular disdain.

That’s all true.  And it’s an important reminder for people like me, a liberal who generally holds unions in low regard.  Unions are hardly the entire solution to labor’s problems, but they’ve earned a prominent seat at the table.

The Armchair Generalist notes a New America Foundation report that examines the United States’ status as the number one arms dealer to the world:

U.S. exports range from combat aircraft to Pakistan, Morocco, Greece, Romania, and Chile to small arms and light weapons to the Philippines, Egypt, and Georgia. In 2006 and 2007, the United States sold weapons to over 174 states and territories, a significant increase from the beginning of the Bush administration when the number of U.S. arms clients stood at 123.

[ . . . ]

U.S. arms and military training played a role in 20 of the world’s 27 major wars in 2006/07 [.] The dollar value of U.S. weapons transfers and weapons orders destined for zones of conflict during that two-year period was $11.2 billion. The biggest recipients were Pakistan ($3.7 billion), Turkey ($3.0 billion), Israel ($2.1 billion), Iraq ($1.4 billion), and Colombia ($575 million).

Death is big business.

When CEOs lead companies through good times, they deserve vast rewards.  When they lead companies through bad times, they deserve vast rewards for sticking around.  Funny how that works, no?  Yglesias thinks this through a bit:

After all, the underlying premise of our finance-led rush to hyperinequality has been that the rich are very very very very different from you and me and that it’s so excruciatingly important that we maintain adequate incentives for them to ply their trade that we should ignore the immense damage rising inequality does to middle class well-being.

One we realize that that’s not the case, that there’s no “magic” at work in the financial field and people are just mucking around I think that has quite radical implications. If nothing the CEOs and top fund managers are doing makes them worthy of taking the blame when the crash hits, then they also don’t deserve nearly the share of the credit — and money — that they got while things were going up.

Expect this point of view to get approximately zero airtime in our ongoing social and political conversations.  Indoctrination is a hard thing to overcome.